McLuhan Told You So!

 The NY Times has a piece from some Harvard Professor bemoaning episteme and social media. First, one must understand episteme and gnossos, both Greek for knowledge, but both a challenge in the Kantian sense for what we know from external world and from what we know internally. Namely the phenomenon of things outside ourselves and the connections of our limbic system.

Now some thirty years ago I wrote about multimedia communications, having spent the prior decade enmeshed in it. Therein I quote McLuhan:

To quote Drucker, who paraphrased McLuhan;

"Did I hear you right," asked one of the professors in the audience, "that you think that printing influenced the courses that the university taught and the role of university all together." "No sir," said McLuhan, "it did not influence; printing determined both, indeed printing determined what henceforth was going to be considered knowledge."

Thus this led to McLuhan's famous phrase that the medium is the message. Specifically, as we developed a new medium for human communications, we dramatically altered the nature of the information that was transferred and the way in which the human perceived what was "truth" and what was not. The television generation of the 1960's was an clear example of the impact of television versus film in portraying the war in Vietnam as compared to the Second World War. The perception of these two events was determined by the difference of the two media that displayed them to the pubic masses. Television allowed for a portrayal that molded more closely to the individual humans impact of the events as compared to films overview of the groups involvement's. Both media deal with the same senses but they are different enough to have determined two different outcomes of the wars. This conclusion is a  cLuhanesque conclusion but is consistent with the changes that McLuhan was recounting in the 1960's in his publications.

 

When we add social media we now have a powerful medium which creates knowledge, the writers episteme,  and with the feedback and manipulation provided in social media we also can impact gnossos. Namely in an interactive medium like a Twitter, one can psychologically profile a single individual. From that profile one can then influence, motivate, and even control that individual. Nothing new here folks, that was the intent! 

The NY Times author notes:

The epistemic coup proceeds in four stages.

 

The first is the appropriation of epistemic rights, which lays the foundation for all that follows. Surveillance capitalism originates in the discovery that companies can stake a claim to people’s lives as free raw material for the extraction of behavioral data, which they then declare their private property.

 

The second stage is marked by a sharp rise in epistemic inequality, defined as the difference between what I can know and what can be known about me. 

 

The third stage, which we are living through now, introduces epistemic chaos caused by the profit-driven algorithmic amplification, dissemination and microtargeting of corrupt information, much of it produced by coordinated schemes of disinformation. Its effects are felt in the real world, where they splinter shared reality, poison social discourse, paralyze democratic politics and sometimes instigate violence and death.

 

In the fourth stage, epistemic dominance is institutionalized, overriding democratic governance with computational governance by private surveillance capital. The machines know, and the systems decide, directed and sustained by the illegitimate authority and anti-democratic power of private surveillance capital. Each stage builds on the last. Epistemic chaos prepares the ground for epistemic dominance by weakening democratic society — all too plain in the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

 Frankly this is in my opinion and my experience a bit sophomoric. It is frankly much worse in that the medium changes not only knowledge but truth, it destroys trust, and it enables third parties to manipulate individuals to do what they end up doing. Worse, the manipulator is a hombre de umbta, a man in the shadows, whose reasons for manipulation may be the antithesis of a free society.

The reality is not a mass assault on the Capitol, but an ongoing manipulation of citizens by the power of the social media. This power is placed in the hands of people we have no knowledge of and in algorithms we have no access to. It is not the simple issue of privacy or surveillance, it is not changing the episteme but altering the gnossos. The true defect caused by social media is the loss of trust...trust in our Government and our institutions. 

The real question is; who is doing this and why? It is clear that there is social media profiling, manipulation and targeting. But who and why? It is not the mob, it is the clearly nefarious clique behind this that we should worry about.

In 2002 I wrote about Privacy and the Internet. Yes, that was two decades before this Times/Harvard observer seems to have caught on to reality. I had just finished building out fiber and Internet in Central and Eastern Europe and also finished a Presidential Commission report on the Internet with the soon to be Chair of Google. Nothing like keen insight into the obvious. I recalled Justice Brandeis and his papers on privacy, also on anonymity. He called it a "right to be left alone". I believe in such a right, but it is a right in Natural and Common Law and unfortunately not in our Constitution. But the social media companies have gone beyond privacy, they now play with influencing and training people to react a certain way.

NJ 2021 01 30

  We are now into the second year of this virus. We can now start to track the vaccines as well as the infections. As we all know the vaccines are being handled in my opinion and in my experience locally by grossly incompetent people which we will return to in November when the try to get into office again.

Now for the data. The first chart is a plot of doubling time versus infections per PoP in Morris County by town. I had thought one could make some sense of this and better asses hot spots but not yet. Doubling times present rates of relative growth. Infections per PoP represent density of infections. Note the highest density at 12% and it has a doubling time of less than 40 days. This is really a hot spot. We see two towns at 8% density and very short doubling times. I would worry there as well. This is what a Public Health office should be focusing on. Regrettably we have none.

 

Here are the doubling times and the towns. Hanover, Chester Borough, Mendham Borough, Mountain Lakes see to be fast growing.

Now we look at density. Dover and surrounding towns are high as we have been noting for months. The 4% level now seems common.

The chart below is new per day for county and town. Town is dropping as is county but held up by the hot spots.

The town prevalence is shown below. We had a peak of over 90 people out of a population of about 9000 at Christmas peak but now we are down to about 65.

Now let us look at the vaccinations of New Jersey vs West Virginia. WV is at almost 14% while NJ is at 8%. NJ has been grossly incompetent. We see 20 year olds claiming to be smokers gaming the system so they can then go out and party while 75+ are dying. Suggestion! Change the will!

Here is NJ progress. They have inoculated 727,426 which is 59% of the available vaccine. Is this a wise strategy? We will see,

Here is the available vaccines. Note Moderna is growing and Pfizer has lagged.Moderna now exceeds Pfizer. Again how about nationalizing Pfizer!

This is an interesting chart. It shows % US PoPs either vaccinated or having been infected, thus having antibodies. We are near 17% in four weeks. I suspect that by the end of February we should be close to 35% total, seeing a slowing in infections and growth in vaccinations.

The death rate is up above 3%.

But we do see some drop in LTC deaths. I still do not understand why there should be any. Also LTC reporting is very noisy and unreliable.

The doubling time for the state is near 100 days and if we go back to the towns we should be concerned with any town with doubling time less than 100!

The new infected per day on the State is below

The county is below

The infections per county is below. Morris is high but is seventh. Cape May is well controlled.

The State prevalence is below down to 0.55%. Namely 1 out of 200 people are currently infected and capable of infecting others.

 

Doubling Times

 The above is a five day running average of doubling times for towns. The longer the doubling time the slower the increase. Low doubling times means high rates of increase. Dover seems to have slowed while Hanover, Butler, Mendham Borough, and a few others have dramatically low doubling times indicating outbreaks.

Frankly the State should be doing this but they are not. Doubling times near 20 are hot spots. We want doubling well above 200 and none meet it.

Look Closer NY Times

 The NY Times say Morris County is at Extremely High Risk. Let us look at the facts.

This is the town data. It is not the County folks it is Dover and surrounding towns. Demographically this is an 80%+ Hispanic multi-family low wage earner environment. The problem is that this should be handled by a Public Health entity. Dover has an infection rate listed at 12% but more likely well over 25%. Morris County has NO vaccine sites open! Yep, none, zero, da nada. The other high towns are all adjacent to Dover. We have been screaming this for months but NJ Public Health is taking care of their friends, not the infected.

It is a shame that the NY Times screams about the wrong problem. But alas this has been all too common.

A Year Ago Today

 NEJM published the article above about a China Virus. It was their words not mine. They noted:

In December 2019, a cluster of patients with pneumonia of unknown cause was linked to a seafood wholesale market in Wuhan, China. A previously unknown betacoronavirus was discovered through the use of unbiased sequencing in samples from patients with pneumonia. Human airway epithelial cells were used to isolate a novel coronavirus, named 2019-nCoV, which formed a clade within the subgenus sarbecovirus, Orthocoronavirinae subfamily. Different from both MERS-CoV and SARS-CoV, 2019-nCoV is the seventh member of the family of coronaviruses that infect humans. Enhanced surveillance and further investigation are ongoing

 In reading this then I had the uncomfortable feeling that the proverbial was hitting the fan. By February 4, 2020, I called it a pandemic. Clearly we had warning, we had the Spanish Flu example, we had multiple other examples in my own lifetime from Polio to HIV. Strangely the man in the Government at the time of HIV, still around, seemed to fumble then as he does now. But to anyone with the slightest understanding of a virus and pandemics, I remember my grandmother's comments on the Spanish Flu, hairs should have been going up on people's heads. 

Needless to say then then President was occupied with his first impeachment but we have thousands of public employees and an equal number of academics who lay dormant! This article screamed pandemic. One does not even have to read behind the lines.

Now that we have multiple vaccines we still have to deal with a massive collection of grossly incompetent State officials who give vaccines to "smokers" in their 20s, so they can go out and party again, even if they do not smoke.  

When the history of this event is written I hope they are not kind to those who were grossly ignorant and unresponsive. 

COVID-19 and Autoantibodies

 

The NY Times posted a piece on autoimmune responses to COVID-19. We have just posted a long analysis of this issue on COVID-19 Autoantibodies. It has been a year since the first Lancet article and tomorrow will be a year since the NEJM article. The autoimmune issues present dramatic sequellae to the infections. Talk about a weaponized bio device...this one gets better every day we look at it. Happy Birthday!

Interesting Numbers

 As of today we have 8% US infected and 8% immunized, one or two shots, for a 16% total. Not clear what daily rate of infection still is, about 500,000 per day with vaccines well above 1 million per day. Vaccines are at 10% per month (33 million per 330 million) and infections at 5% per month. One can do the math. In a month we will see a significant increase in vaccines and some increase in infected. As noted there is no herd immunity with this virus and the mutation rate is phenomenal.

It took 3 Weeks for the NY Times

 Three weeks ago I noted here that West Virginia was smashing ahead in an efficient and effective manner in distributing the vaccine. Finally the brains at the NY Times were made aware! The Times notes:

As many states struggle with logistical and bureaucratic challenges, leaving vaccines unused, West Virginia offers a remarkable example of a state that has successfully given out almost all of its shots. Yet it provides perhaps the clearest picture of a more fundamental problem that looms ahead for the country: Even the most efficient state vaccine operations do not have enough shots for all who want them.

The reason to me is simple. No Harvard MBAs or Goldman cronies.  The grossly inept characters in Trenton continue on their path to the River Styx. Cerberus awaits folks, and it is not a kindly pet. In WV they had to keep it simple. Simple works. Not like The Banker and Nurse Ratchet here in NJ who are more interested in getting re-elected, than in being effective.

 

What is Old is New Again

 The Left's use of neologisms and euphemisms and the focus on reinterpreting language is not new. In reading Proctor's book, The Nazi War on Cancer, we note:

The doublespeak of totalitarian regimes is legendary Nazi Germany is full of words cloaked in careful disguises, political "euphemisms" designed not to soften a blow but to deceive. Joseph Goebbels was the master of this art, barring words like sabotage and assassination that, from their very utterance, might give people the wrong kind of ideas:

In wartime one should not speak of assassination either in a negative or an affirmative sense. There are certain words from which we should shrink as the devil does from Holy Water; among these are, for instance, the words "sabotage" and "assassination." One must not permit such terms to become part and parcel of everyday slang.

Some examples are amusing: Germans were not supposed to use the traditional expression "catastrophe aid" but rather the more upbeat "first aid"; also barred was any media use of the expression "Yellow Peril," in deference to the Japanese. There are efforts to modernize medical discourse: the shift from "cripple" (Kriippel) to "handicapped" (Behinderte) occurs in this period, for example, as does the shift from idiot and asylum to retarded and clinic. Strange as it may seem, both of these latter terms were introduced in the early 1940s by physicians orchestrating the "euthanasia" operation. The term "handicapped" (Behinderte), for example, was first used in 1940 by physicians and bureaucrats organizing the murder of the physically and mentally handicapped. Genocide was not a matter of public discourse (the word had not yet even been coined), so "special treatment" (Sonderbehandlung) became one of many code words for murder, along with Abtransport, Desinfektion, Einschldferung, Endlosung, Erlosung, Euthanasie, Evakuierung, Gnadentod, Judenaktion, Liquidation, Reinigung, Selektion,  Vergasung, Vernichtung, and so forth, ad nauseam. The Nazis ended up with as many words for murder as Eskimos (purportedly) have for snow.

 

 Thus, this use of "proper" words has an interesting provenance that may allow one to see where such playing with language leads. 

Five Questions

1. It has been observed that there are post infection sequellae in various organs such as myocarditis. Is there any understanding of the mechanism of these sequellae? Is there any compilation of their incidence and resultant level of morbidity?

 2. Mutations of the mRNA are significant. Since COVID-19 is a classic corona virus, being a single stranded mRNA virus, it is known that mutations can be quite frequent. We know that B.1.1.7 is more contagious yet not more virulent. Is this because the spike proteins match the ACE2 receptor better thus initiating multiple virion particles per cell? Also, it has been noted that there are slight ACE2 receptor proteins on Asians as compared to Europeans. If this is the case does this explain for the lower per PoP incidence in China, Korea and Japan?

 3. Mutations occur as long as the patients has not developed an immune response. Thus, in immunocompromised patients, including those ill as well as older patients, present a putative clear and present danger as mutation sources. If so, does not this drive the immunization policy as a scientifically based observation?

 4. It has been observed that the virus is related to the development of auto-antibodies and thus autoimmune types sequellae. This may affect a broad spectrum of patients. How can this be monitored and in turn treated?

 5. Tracking mutations is critical. Is there any proposed plan to establish a genome database for mRNA tracking mRNAs from infected patients? If so, would the primary focus be on changes in the 3,000 nucleotide spike protein or is it necessary to monitor the entire 30,000 nucleotide mRNA? Should such a database be open and accessible? If so, would there be any patient privacy concerns?

NJ 2021 01 23

 This will be a long report. It details the vaccines fiasco, demographics and infections/mortality. Let's first start with NJ vaccine availability. It is shown below. Now apparently Pfizer has announced a refusal to meet prior commitments so perhaps we may see a nationalizing of the company, but possibly. Total supply is about 950,000.

The chart below compares NJ and West Virginia. NJ is half of WV but in NJ they are getting to the murderers, arsonists, thieves, smokers and the Press. More on that latter.

Vaccination progress is slow. About 50% of the supply has been administered as noted above the administration is chaotic. The Banker and Nurse Ratchet spent the week in DC I gather and some underling built the web site to register. It appears to be one developed by someone's nephew who took an online web building course and this may have been a class project. It is clearly the worst design I have ever seen and just does not work. Incompetence reigns in NJ.

Now I have called this the Biden Curve. It represents promised to actual. Strangely the first few weeks will be a Trumpian hold over so we see that hitting 1 million a week is a slam dunk. The promised what what was already a fact, at least for now. The challenge is doubling or tripling. I gather the President has promised to give Canada some of the US Pfizer supply so it will make the challenge worse.

Now we look at NJ details. The county towns show high incidence as noted before. The Dover cluster seems to dominate and it should have been addressed months ago! So much for Public Health.

The new cases in County and Town show a flattening as best we can tell. It is post holiday and hopefully the "families" can get back to "business as usual".

The town prevalence is still peaking. Not clear the problem but the chart below shows 100 people walking around infected and spreading the virus. We shall discuss who shortly.

Now for demographics. The chart below is the percent by race. Whites dominate but this must be normalized.

By age and normalized we see the largest are 18-19 and 80+ Not many 80+ but tons of 18-19. They are the spreaders. They are the spreaders! They are reckless, wandering about all over and all hours then spreading upwards to 30-49 and 50-64. This is again a typical public health problem, educating and policing this group is critical. So much of the infection spread can be handled simply by targeting this spreaders.

This is the critical slide. The Hispanics are demographically the most significant spreaders. Most work in jobs such as housekeeping and local labor and they live in Dover and cluster towns of high density residences. This is again a simple public health issue which has not been addressed. Now for low Asian counts. As we noted in our paper on Mutations this is due to the fact that Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese have a slightly different genetic ACE2 receptor which reduces the spike protein adhesion and virulence. One would suspect this number is dominated by South Asians such as Indian and Pakistan communities who do not have the genetic advantage of the Chinese.

Death rates are running at 2%. Not clear why it has jumped but suspect higher overall infection rates.

Doubling time was doing great until yesterday. However I suspect it is the corrupted data reporting problem which has been chronic. Namely what is reported on a specific day may be days or even weeks old.

This aberration is shown below for the state. A significant daily increase.

 The county is below:

The deaths are shown below slowly decreasing in rate:

LTC deaths seem to be decreasing but they are still very high. This should have been the first target after health care workers but the gross incompetence of the State has led to another thousand needless deaths.

State prevalence is high at 0.6%.

County is also at same rate.

Too Many Words

 I am reminded of the Emperor's comment in Amadeus that Mozart had "too many notes". The just issued "plan" from the White House may have "too many words". (Looked like some Consulting Report from some MBAs) Keep it simple is a good dictum. Again West Virginia has done that by necessity. New Jersey has created chaos. It is not clear that the plan will remediate any of this.

The critical issues are as follows:

1. Mutations are a clear and present danger since no matter how fast we go the mutants go faster

2. Mutations are driven by immunocompromised people, that is the sick and aged

3. Stop that mutation first then go to the Press, Smokers and Amazon employees and favorite political supporters

4. People must understand the sequellae. It is not just the virus it is what follows no matter what age. Also auto-antibodies have become a serious issues and result in auto-immune diseases.

5. There will never be herd immunity due to mutations and residual virions in nasal passages

6. Vaccines are being produced at a marginal level. Scale is always a challenge. The carrot and stick approach always works.

7. Tracking mutations is critical. Publishing them in a database kept current is critical.

8. Data is the sine qua non. We need transparent, correct, and open data platforms. In this society Government is the least competent, people trained in data analysis are what we should rely upon to have an open conversation

9. Leadership must be empathetic not dictatorial

10. This virus will be back again and again, we must adapt to ongoing immunizations

Other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?

Not Workable

 USA Today reports:

Amazon is offering its help to President Joe Biden with the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines, while seeking to get its employees inoculated "at the earliest appropriate time." In a letter written to Biden and dated Wednesday, Amazon Worldwide Consumer CEO ... said the e-commerce giant is prepared to leverage its operations to help vaccinate 100 million Americans in the first 100 days of the president's administration. "Our scale allows us to make a meaningful impact immediately in the fight against COVID-19, and we stand ready to assist you in this effort," wrote Clark. The letter also calls for vaccinating Amazon employees, many of whom are essential workers, as soon as possible.

Now I was a big Amazon user. However over the past few years I come to find I cannot trust what I buy or have any reliability on when or if it will be delivered. It may be, in my opinion and in my experience, a knockoff product sent from some place in China and totally defective. Okay, so I lost some money in a bad purchase. But my life, lost to a knockoff vaccine, delivered by some contract worker possibly totally unqualified? No way! 

This is in my opinion and in my experience just another lobbying ploy to get their workers at the front of the line while we poor schlubs get stiffed again! In New Jersey, The Banker and Nurse Ratchet have already moved the Press, the Prisons and the Smokers to the front. Now we want to move what?

This is why so many cannot stand politics. Amazon is a low cost distributor of often low cost products. I have now been going directly to the vendor instead of Amazon to try to avoid the knock offs. Batteries that do not work and with fake labels and the list goes on.

 Trust is a key element of getting vaccinated. West Virginia has been successful, in my opinion and in my experience I would not trust Amazon!

A Conundrum

 The Biden Admin stated they would do 100 million in 100 days. That means 1 million per day. BUT! Moderna delivers 2.15 million per week and Pfizer 4.3 million per week, or 6.45 per week, or less than the required 7 million per week. One assumes increased production but the 1 million per day was meant to be in the arm numbers. However following Bloomberg's tracker we have only 47.7% of the delivered actually deployed in the arm. Thus there is both a shortfall in delivery and massive shortfall in execution. This reminds me of the massively incorrect Romer curve on unemployment after the 2008 crash. Transparency and honesty are critical.

Thus we ask; what is the plan? Show us the numbers. You need a transparent CDC etc, not really getting this, hopefully it will change.

Worse Before Better?

 Nature has an interesting piece on the phenomenon of auto-antibodies, the immune system attacking the immune system. They have noted:

More than a year after COVID-19 emerged, many mysteries persist about the disease: why do some people get so much sicker than others? Why does lung damage sometimes continue to worsen well after the body seems to have cleared the SARS-CoV-2 virus? And what is behind the extended, multi-organ illness that lasts for months in people with ‘long COVID’? A growing number of studies suggest that some of these questions might be explained by the immune system mistakenly turning against the body — a phenomenon known as autoimmunity.

 

This is a somewhat new observation. We have similarly argued that the innate system also has this form of over reaction via NK cells. They continue:

There are several theories to explain how autoimmunity might emerge from COVID and other infections. Some people might be predisposed to producing autoantibodies that can then wreak havoc during an infection. Alternatively, infections could even trigger the production of autoantibodies. If researchers can establish the link, they might be able to come up with avenues for treatment, both for the repercussions of COVID and for other diseases caused by viruses.

 

This is a significant area of research and strangely the virus may dramatically enhance our understanding of the immune system.

Welcome to New Jersey

 Well The Banker and Nurse Ratchet are doing a great job. We have just been told that we could get vaccines at my two affiliated hospitals in New York (MSKCC and CUMC) but since we are New Jersey residents and I no longer work full time it is illegal to cross state lines and get vaccinated. Here in New Jersey we are behind murderers, thieves, drug addicts, smokers, the Press Corps, morbidly obese,  etc. We are locked in our own prison of the political elite, if that is what one may want to call it.

Now the problem is that the virus is mutating at an ever increasing rate in immunocompromised folks and older folks with reduced immune systems. Thus more virulent forms will likely result. That my friends is science. The vaccine plan in New Jersey is pure unmitigated politics. 

This is pure Kafkaesque. How in God's name can these politicians get away with this. The death toll for LTC residents today along is near 60! It should be zero if Trenton had done what the should have done. I suspect we shall just see it getting worse! It may become like the Potato Famine in Ireland, where the Brits allowed dead bodies aside the road, they never made it to the graveyard.

Vaccine in New Jersey

 

Here is the vaccine data for New Jersey. Other states as above. We seem to be getting 150,000 per week with a total nearing 700,000 thus far. The concern is rate of increase is very low, the 150,000 per week on a 9 million population is a long time to see any progress. Namely 60 weeks for one dose or 120 for both. That is almost 3 years! BUT, the distribution is one third the available so we are looking at a decade to get the population done. Remember West Virginia will be done by April this year. Since The Banker assumes he is running this year he seems in my opinion to be dealing with his "backers" first and his taxpayers last! But he fails to note the mutation problem. By leaving the more vulnerable at risk they allow for massive viral mutations and all those vaccinated as favorites may be knocked off by the mutants. The mutants will be the revenge of the forgotten.

A Thought from Thomas Paine

 In 1798 Paine wrote:

The earth, in its natural, cultivated state was, and ever would have continued to be, the common property of the human race. In that state every man would have been born to property. . . . But the earth in its natural state, as before said, is capable of supporting but a small number of inhabitants compared with what it is capable of doing in a cultivated state. And as it is impossible to separate the improvement made by cultivation from the earth itself, upon which that improvement is made, the idea of landed property arose from that parable connection; but it is nevertheless true, that it is the value of the improvement, only, and not the earth itself, that is individual property. Every proprietor, therefore, of cultivated lands, owes to the community ground-rent (for I know of no better term to express the idea) for the land which he holds; and it is from this ground-rent that the fund in this plan is to issue.

An interesting concept. Locke said our right to property was the result of our labor. Thus cultivation adds value and thus benefits ownership. But Paine delimits that absolute ownership with a residual debt to the original owner, at least in part.

Pragmatism vs Incompetence

 

The above is a graph that compares the % PoPs vaccinated versus time for New Jersey vs West Virginia. WV is highly pragmatic. No need for massive confusing and non-functioning computer systems. Teachers showed up a week ago Thursday at regional High Schools at times specified by alphabetic last names, same for police, fire, rescues. Hospital in place. Over 70 at hospitals, now all done! On to the remaining 90%. Kept simple. As usual it works.

New Jersey with its massive amount of generally incompetent State workers have bumbled about and gotten about one third the way of WV. The NJ computer system is a mess, the massive mega sites collapsing, LTC deaths doubling! Given WV progress, based upon the current run rate they should be at 100% by April 1 pending supply. New Jersey may make it by the next century.

My greatest fear is a total reboot from Washington, destroying the pragmatism and loading the Feds on top. I truly pray that does not happen, except in NJ, it really can't get any worse with The Banker and Nurse Ratchet.

Great Choice

 The NY Times announced the appointment of Eric Lander as the Cabinet Level Science Adviser. He is a fantastic choice and may have the potential to infuse broad based credibility and confidence and a shipwrecked function. Eric is an engineer by initial training and admittedly wandered into biotech. He was a key player in the human genome project and one of the best instructors I have ever seen. He introduce me to CRISPRS just as they were coming out, a brief side comment once and that was enough. If Eric said they were of interest then follow the yellow brick road. Congratulations and hopefully he avoids the slews and arrows of DC.

NJ 2021 01 16

 Before beginning let is address some scientific facts. The main threat now is the significant mutation rates. Namely, the logic is as follows:

1. Mutation results in ever more aggressive viruses.

2. Mutations occur many more times in immunocompromised and older patients

3. Younger patients have dramatically lower mutations

4. Some of the more virulent mutants are from just this pool of patients

5. Vaccinations must address this issue. Namely immunocompromised and older patients should be immunized to reduce mutations.

6. The use and deployment of vaccines on people at lower immune risk created an clear and present danger to all.

7. Currently states such as New Jersey are executing a plan which will create the highest mutation rates and in turn dramatically more virulent strains. Or as Forest Gump says, stupid is as stupid does.

Now for this week:

The town has ever-increasing prevalence. It is 50% higher than at the peak. I suspect this is the holiday season and the massively large gathering we saw. 

The new per day for town and county, averaged, is shown below. The county still sees a peak and again holiday. If that were the case we would expect a reduction in the next month.

As usual New Jersey is lagging in vaccine utilization. The characteristic of the effective states is pure pragmatism. Also they lack the cronyism of New Jersey and New York,. New Jersey is the worst because this is an election year for the Governor and every influence group has their hand out. Thus the massively high mortality in older people.

The lack if integrity in death reports makes the rate highly problematic. We believe it is still 2%, well above last summer as low as 0.2%.

The doubling time is flat. That means it is not getting worse but not better.

The state rate per day is below

The county below here

Total deaths below showing the up-sweep

The daily deaths are below. There are still 20 LTC per day! One wonders what The Banker and Nurse Ratchet think they are doing, there will be another 7,000 deaths just from their lack of organization in LTC alone!